Health care, housing, economic development and relationship building are all areas the Town of Vermilion council is looking to tackle, according to Mayor Robert Snow.
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Sitting in his office at the front of town hall, Snow spoke to the importance of being available.
“When I was running, my vision was always to have the office up front here,” he said. “In a day, my day is full with people stopping in (and chatting).”
Looking forward, Snow explained one thing the current council was able to bring back was stability, following a rocky previous term which saw the previous mayor sanctioned.
“I think we’re right on track, but just bringing some stability back (to the town),” Snow said.
He said one of their major goals is working in collaboration with local partners.
“The other big goal in the future is ensuring that we support our stakeholders and our partners,” he said. “It starts with neighbouring municipalities, but it doesn’t end there. I think of Lakeland College — it’s such an asset in our community.
“Ensuring that we can work with our neighbours, work with those people that are in our town.”
A change implemented by local council is how they operate their economic development committee.
“We’ve taken the stance, we’re the ones that have to make the decisions but we’re not the specialists,” Snow said. “We’ve changed our model in that committee and now we have businesses come in. We sit down with them at the table and collaborate on how do we, first support businesses that we have, but also attract new businesses.”
He said he spoke to a local business owner who told him the best way to draw businesses into the community is to see existing businesses thrive.
“We’ve taken that to heart, how do we support our local businesses,” Snow said. “When you look at our strategic plan, economic development and growth is crucial.”
A win for the town included the recent passing of a fire agreement between them and the County of Vermilion River.
“As you heard at Tuesday’s (June 23) council meeting, we’ve reached a fire agreement (with the County of Vermilion River),” he said. “Both municipalities came together. It was never that we had disagreements, but we were thinking of our own communities.
“We’ve really started to say as a region we’re stronger, so let’s work together. You start to build that relationship and I think it’s really neat to see that relationship grow.”
The relationship building has also extended to the province.
“The other area we’ve really strived to improve is, we don’t want to go to the Government of Alberta hands open saying, ‘give us this,’” he said. “Our goal is, they’re a partner, they’re a stakeholder in our community. When we go to them, we want to work as partners.”
While nothing is formalized yet, Snow said they’ve been working on restoring the CN Station Building at Vermilion Provincial Park.
“I talked about the CN station, we have no formal agreements with the province on what’s going to happen with that,” he said. “We have a lot of great discussions and opportunities arise from those discussions.”
Something council has been working on is housing, an issue they continue to deal with.
“You have to juggle business growth and commercial growth and housing growth,” Snow said. “If you build too many houses and you don’t have enough businesses, no one’s going to live in the houses. If you have too many businesses and there’s not enough houses, you’re not going to have that business growth.
“I think our biggest challenge right now is just getting the housing that we need for a sustainable future.”
Health care continues to be top of mind for the small Alberta town, including the need for paramedics.
“We need a full complement of paramedics in our community and we don’t have that,” he said. “We need to ensure that health care is strong; our council has been very committed to that.”
A potential solution, according to Snow, could be the college.
“It also goes back to having a college in Lloydminster and in Vermilion. What a great opportunity to look at how do we maybe train some health-care professionals,” he said. “Statistically, if you train them and they’re from that area, they’re most likely going to stay in that area.
“Health care is a challenge and I think we’re getting there. We have a good complement of physicians right now, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need more. Then the other side, our nurse practitioners have really shined in our community.”
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